sfSoundSalonSeries: Seth Cluett & sfSoundGroup

Visiting from New Jersey, Seth Cluett presents a live set using sung and electronically generated sine tones, room acoustic phenomena, and recorded sound exploring the boundary between personal and communal listening. Constructing a focused, attentive perceptual space and an elastic, malleable experience of duration, the sound world of this work is tensely suspended between full body immersion and brittle, sparse timelessness.
sfSoundGroup performs a program with instruments and electronics:
Johanna Beyer – Music of Spheres (1938)
for electronics and percussion
James Tenney – Ergodos II (for John Cage) (1978)
for computer generated tape with any number of strings, winds, brass, voices, and percussion
Paul Dresher – Channels Passing (1982)
for oboe, clar, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, violin, and cello
sfSoundGroup – Improvisation (2013)
for you!
Seth Cluett (b. Troy, NY) is an artist, performer, and composer whose work ranges from photography and drawing to video, installation, concert music, and critical writing. His “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). Boomcat described his 2011 CD Objects of Memory on the Line Imprint as a “beautifully tremulous and thoughtful exploration in electro-acoustic sound.” His work explores everyday actions at extreme magnification, celebrates minutae by amplifying impossible tasks, and explores the workings of memory in forms that rethink the role of the senses in an increasingly technologized society. The recipient of grants from Meet the Composer, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant Program, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he has presented work internationally at venues such as the MATA Festival, MassMoCA, The Kitchen, GRM, Palais de Tokyo, FRAC Franche-Compté, STEIM, and Dundee Contemporary Arts. Recent work is documented on the Line Imprint, Radical Matters, Sedimental, and Winds Measure recordings. This past fall Cluett joined the faculty of Contemporary Arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey where he teaches courses in audio engineering as well as electronic and experimental sound practices.
sfSoundGroup is the main performing group of the sfSoundSalonSeries. Virtuoso instrumentalists who are all composers in their own right, they offer a diverse range of talents including skilled improvisation,
performance art, computer audio programming, university-level music scholarship, instrument making, didjeridu playing, and styrofoam bowing. Performers for this concert include: Monica Scott, cello; Brendan Tai-Long, trombone; Benjamin Kreith, violin; John Ingle, saxophone; Matt Ingalls, clarinet; Tom Dambly, trumpet; and Kyle Bruckmann, oboe.